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Auto trading is only thing that conquered my darkside
I'm not trying to be contrarian, I'm really not. But are you SERIOUSLY validating your "fluid" trading methodology with performance reports from an online stock trading game?
Look, Tonight try to get 20k. Maybe in a few days you might be able to break 100k. The act of trading 10k to 100k in one session shouldn't last more than an hour or two when you've broken the learning curve. The point is to teach your brain to identify good trading opportunities without indicators or statistics by repetition. You will fail over and over, but if you keep at it you'll get it after a couple hours like learning to ride a bike.
You will see how simple trading can be improved by waiting, time-lapsing, or switching charts till you get a good setup to execute. MIND CONTROL. If you do this time and time again you will understand this isn't gambling. You don't need rigid details about your setups other than they are significantly more predictable than other setups. I suggest you look for key resistance and support levels by using different time frames. You will see that price works up to bounce off of, or poises up to break through these levels in reoccurring patterns.
This isn't validation of my "fluid" trading methodology, It's simply a crash course on trading stocks without training wheels. Learn through experience.
When your done, try it on CL in simulation. Samething.
Well then don't use it to make your point about automated trading. With all of your training and experience it doesn't look good when you make sweeping generalisations which are not correct.
I actually reckon you probably have some good points hidden in what you write, but when you say things like most mechanical trading has a discetionary element it's hard to see past that.
I know that you mean 'choosing which one to run based on market conditions' is discretionary, but there are a whole load of mechanical strategies that you know nothing about. My guess is that you had a big go at automated trading and couldn't get it to work consistently. You wouldn't be the only one. But now you want to say that all automated trading will turn out like this, and that if you don't have a team of people it won't work etc etc. But the facts are that people have made it work, and no they're can't be bothered to prove it to you (you wouldn't accept it anyway)
You see you assume that programs can't adapt to market conditions and must be switched on and off. Wrong. You assume that scheduled news must be avoided manually. Wrong. You assume that a program has to do worse than a human whne a price shock comes in. Wrong. I could go on.
The fact is, there is a whole load of ways and methods of automated trading that you never did or considered. And you don't need a team of people to do it. So your generalisations about automated trading are always going to get a reaction.
(For what it's worth, I don't think disc trading is fatally flawed, but I think it's very hard to say whether you are good at it, or just lucky, because it's very hard to calculate your performance against expectation. I asked twice on this forum for a disc trader to say how they tested their system, and how they have any sort of expectancy for their system. Complete silence. Hey, here's a flippant observation: The percentage of disc traders who have been successful for the last three years is probably the same as the percentage of traders you would statistically expect to be profitable for three years through luck alone.)
That's nearly akin to saying..."The number of lottery winners over the past few years have been unusually lucky."
For every George Soros, there's literally hundreds of thousands of Hedge Fund managers, retail traders and outright amateurs who either don't even beat the general market index return or lose money.
I have no point. I see your point. I think that it's more valid than most think, but it's not universally true. If one ever gets an inside look at how finance works, one will quickly see the power of "discretionary" thought...
But that does not prove that Soros is not talented...
That is my point - to not talk about universal truths (and is why my observation was flippant). The number of great discretionary traders tells us little about the merits of auto trading, esp given that auto trading is more of a recent thing.
I've seen how finance works. Indeed discretionary can be powerful. I've also seen it screw up loads of times. I've seen the profit bottom line be the most important measure of 'performance' until it all blows up and people realise risk-return wasn't so clever.
The bottom line for me is that people can have all the opinions they like about the merits, and I'll respect those opinions, but when the disc crowd start telling the automated crowd how useless their work is it gets really annoying. Especially, given the irony that the automated crowd are much better positioned to evaluate their performance in a statistically rigorous way.
OMG! Play the chartgame for 2 hours, then go trade the CL. That is outright delusional. People, this is the person you are debating with. 6 months from now, he will blow up his account, and won't even be on this forum anymore. It is a pointless and futile dialogue.
